Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis by Dan O'Brien and Steve Ferchaud

Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis is a six-part illustrated series that is a throwback to pulp books. The first installment goes on sale this Halloween, but you can pre-order now.

Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis takes place in an alternate universe where lizard men, fish-faced nightclub owners, and tentacled mobsters are everyday people. Derrick Diamond, a private eye, is tasked with delivering a mysterious artifact to the Fat Man. But there are others who are interested in the artifact, and their intentions appear to be just as malevolent as the titular Nazis. To put it succinctly, Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis is an illustrated short story, so I can't say anything more about the plot as that would spoil it for you.

O'Brien has lovingly crafted his characters with familiar personalities. Derrick Diamond channels Bogart. Ava Harpy is the femme fatale nightclub singer. The Weasel lives up to his name. And the Fat Man is the successful mobster who wields power and conducts his business transactions with shrewd calculation.

Ferchaud's ink drawings capture the noir atmosphere and the essence of the hard-boiled characters. To say that they add a nice touch to the work would be an understatement. While O'Brien's words offer enough visual cues, Ferchaud's work brings it to life.

So if you're a fan of pulp or old gangster films, and don't mind a dash of dark fantasy, check out the first installment of Mobsters, Monsters & Nazis.

The Book Thief

The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
584 pages
Picador (2005)

"Five hundred souls. I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I'd throw them over my shoulder. It was only the children I carried in my arms."

This is a novel narrated by Death. It’s January 1939, and nine year-old Liesel Meminger and her young brother, Werner, are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family in Molching, a small town outside Munich. Liesel’s father was arrested as a Kommunist, and Liesel’s mother fears a similar fate. During the train journey, Death takes six year-old Werner, but not without noticing Liesel, too. It will be the first of many such encounters. By her brother’s graveside, Liesel’s life is changed when she finds a mysterious object, partially hidden in the snow: it’s a book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook, left there by accident. It’s the first of many she will steal.

So begins a fascination with books and words as Liesel, with the help of her foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi pyres. With the help of her new friend Rudy Steiner, she liberates several from the personal library of the mayor’s wife. As years pass, Death watches. Life with the Hubermann’s on Himmel Street is punctuated by the terror of the Allied bombings, but is otherwise as tolerable as a wartime childhood can be. Then her foster father repays an old debt by allowing a Jewish fist-fighter to hide out in their cellar, and Liesel’s life is changed in more ways than she could’ve imagined.

Does the world really need another Holocaust novel? Yes, if it's as good as this one. No, it’s not some German inversion of The Diary of a Young Girl despite what the synopsis might suggest. Nor is it Harry Potter and The Holocaust as more than one critic has quipped. Young Australian writer Markus Zusak is a prize-winning writer of children’s fiction, but The Book Thief is his daring adult debut.

And what a debut it is. The Book Thief is one of those extremely rare novels: an absolute page-turner as well as a serious work of art. It’s unsettling, provocative, triumphant and tragic, at times fanciful and at others relentlessly grim. It’s beautiful and harrowing in almost equal measure. More than anything, it’s emotionally gripping in a way that few novels are. I stayed up one night, determined to finish it, and brushed away tears for the last fifty pages.

Zusak says he was inspired by two real-life events related to him by his German parents: the bombing of Munich, and a teenage boy offering bread to an emaciated Jew being marched through the streets, ending with both boy and Jewish prisoner being whipped by a soldier. As Philip Ardagh in The Guardian noted, it’s the way in which Zusak combines such terrible events with such believable characters and the minutiae of everyday life in Nazi Germany that makes this book so special.

The genius, too, is in the voice. Death is arch, wry, and given to bad jokes about his profession, but he’s also moved by the plight of humans and amused by our attitudes to him. "By the way – I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me." Death is closely involved with what’s happening in wartime Europe – and obviously very busy – but he’s also, for the most part, emotionally detached from it. This allows him to comment on man’s inhumanity to man without ever being ponderous or moralistic, and without taking sides. This is important. The novel could be painfully sappy or irritatingly didactic without such a detached perspective driving it.

Zusak uses a plain style, punctuated only occasionally by vivid images. The moments of joy and violence, when they come, are all the more striking for the economy with which they’re depicted. It’s an object lesson to writers who want to deal with complex moral issues or powerful themes. And the lesson is this: just get the hell out of the way. Your language doesn’t need to be dazzling and ornate; your plotting doesn’t need to trick and surprise; you don't need to lecture or berate. Carefully choose your narrative point of view. Then put the right characters in the right situation and describe what happens as clearly as you can. The rest will take care of itself.

This is an important indirect lesson in a book that takes as its subtext the power of reading and writing. As Janet Maslin in The New York Times commented: "It will be widely read and admired because it tells a story in which books become treasures. And because there's no arguing with a sentiment like that."

The Reader

The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
224 pages
Vintage (1999)

Michael Berg, 15, is on his way home from school in post-World War II Germany when he falls ill and is befriended by the 36-year-old Hanna who takes him home. When he recovers many weeks later, he dutifully brings her flowers in appreciation, and the two become lovers. The relationship, at first purely physical, deepens when Hanna takes an interest in Michael’s education, insisting that he study hard and attend classes. Soon, their meetings take on a more meaningful routine in which after lovemaking Michael reads aloud from the classics. There are hints of Hanna's darker side: one inexplicable moment of violence over a minor misunderstanding, and the fact that Michael knows nothing of her life other than that she collects tickets on the streetcar. Hanna leaves the city abruptly and mysteriously, and Michael does not see her again until years later, as a law student, he sits in on her case when she is being tried as a Nazi criminal.

The Reader explores Germany's guilt-ridden relationship with its own past by objectifying it in the sexual and emotional coupling of a 15-year-old boy and a 36-year-old woman. On the face of it, that doesn't sound like the premise for one of the most engaging pieces of Holocaust fiction available, but it is. Far from eroticizing Nazism or trivializing the Holocaust, using the metaphor of a human relationship makes them both more accessible. Schlink provides a way into the unique postwar experience of the German people by relating it to things we have all experienced: guilt and romantic love. Issues and events which usually repel or dismay us with their enormity are taken out of the zones of History and Philosophy and reconfigured on a human, interpersonal scale - the scale on which they actually happened, and on which they must be confronted if we are ever to understand them fully.

I was surprised and moved to find a novel that treats the Holocaust in this way; a novel that risks being misunderstood in order to foster understanding. The erotic aspect of the novel is, in the end, a minor one and hardly the point: it's about so much more than that. Through careful characterization and plot development, Schlink manages not only to make plain the ease with which German civilians were drawn into unspeakable roles, but also to explore the difference between a legal conviction and real justice, between retribution and recompense, and, most importantly, the almost insoluble situation in which Germans born postwar find themselves - laden with guilt for things they did not do and for which they cannot possibly atone.

Interestingly, Schlink's book also becomes a sustained yet subtle commentary on the function of literature and literacy as ways of recording and recovering the past. Those interested in this subtext might like to read next W. G. Sebald's On The Natural History of Destruction which explores the historical unwillingness, and therefore the contemporary inability, of German literature to deal with the terrorist victimization of German civilians at the hands of the Allies, e.g. the bombing of Dresden. Anyone unfamiliar with W. G. Sebald’s work should read all of it. Immediately.

For all its high intent, and equally high achievement, The Reader is almost an easy read. Schlink's language (or Carol Brown Janeway's translation, at least) is smooth, spare and precise. Schlink's subject is dignified by such straightforwardness.